May Retreat
Join us at our facilitated retreat May 24-26 at Bon Secours in Maryland. We will reflect on ways of being and explore time as it flows through our lives through symbols and story. An option to earn 14 CEs is available.
Consultations with Dr. Dee focus on your interests, questions, exploration of new techniques, reflections on ways to engage your client’s sand scene, and work with just a few symbols. Each consultation is for 90 minutes.
What’s New
- Clinical Immersion in Narrative Sand TherapyTake your retreat to a professional level and earn 14 CEs this May. During our time together, at our retreat, Pausing Time: A Facilitated Retreat to Reflect on Ways of Being, you will have time and space to safely immerse in the symbol process, conceptualize sand scenes from humanistic, existential, and constructionist theories, and apply what you find to three clinical perspectives. Immersion will focus on therapist competencies and attitudes for play therapy, art, drama, and expressive therapies. The weekend provides space to process symbols, imagined stories, and projective images for play therapy and expressive therapies. How Does the Clinical… Read more: Clinical Immersion in Narrative Sand Therapy
What is Narrative Sand Therapy?
Narrative Sand Therapy© (NST) is a symbol-focused therapeutic modality for clients throughout the lifespan and across cultures. A collaborative approach to engage individuals, couples, and groups in a deepening process, narrative symbol engagement emphasizes the importance of symbol voice and dialogue.
Grounded in existential and social construction, the therapist attends with heightened presence, facilitates permission, protection, empowerment, and active imagination. The process validates client experience through metaphor, wonderment, and process hypnosis.
Based on more than four decades of research, clinician training and feedback, our focus is to support clinical competencies, mindful of scope, to understand and respond to client symbol process and sand scenes.
Rigorous and immersive training for mental health professionals.
Our courses are designed for psychologists, counselors, marriage and family therapists, and social workers and are built from research-based and clearly articulated core clinical competencies.
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The Poetics of Symbols in Sand
by Dr. Dee Preston-Dillon
Image and Symbol are the third presence in the consulting room.
When we are fully present to the image, the symbol, the metaphor,
When we Activate Imagination,
We become fully present to Existential Experience,
We Immerse and Encounter
Intersubjective Dialogue,
We open a Way to Transformation, Validation,
Meaning-Making
Competencies . . .
It is not the Approach we use with Symbols in Sand,
It is not how many symbols we have,
It is how we Understand and Respond,
How we handle Depth, how we Validate, how we are Present,
How we Resonate, balancing Silence with Voice and Wonderment,
It is how we Witness Meaning-Making,
For clients, their story, and Symbols in the Sand
Immersed in the I-Thou Encounter . . .
Grounded in Interpersonal – Intersubjective Meaning-Making,
We Witness in Silence . . .
Engage in Wonderment
With Invitation . . .
Innovation-in-the-moment
Through Collaborative Active Imagination . . .
Symbols have Voice to tell their Stories,
We Validate, Honor, and Pace
Freeing clients to Encounter, Reclaim, Recover,
Rejuvenate
Narrative Sand Therapy. . .
Wherein Cultural Worlds Come Alive . . .
Landscapes fill with Myths, Symbols, Ritual, History . . .
A Safe Space, where Being . . . becomes Visible
We attend Social-Cultural-Political Constructions . . .
Clients . . .
Explore . . .
Reflect . . .
Give Voice
Reclaim Identity, Freedom, Connection, Power
Narrative Sand Therapy. . .
A Hermeneutic Circle
Depth, Discernment, Discovery
Revealed through
Symbol, Story, Silence . . .
we
Attend, Amplify, Activate Imagination
Wonderment . . .
